The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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Johnny Gets His Gun

Forget
Bruce Willis and Don Johnson, America’s hottest TV cop is
27-year-old Johnny Depp. As the star of the hit show 21
Jump Street, where he plays a
tough undercover
police officer complete with ripped jeans and Harley Davidson,
he’s
become the biggest young TV sex symbol since Michael J Fox, pulling
in fan mail by the lorryload. He may be unknown over here at present,
but Johnny Depp is a name that won’t remain anonymous for
long.
Angela Holden talks to American TV’s newest ratings buster.

A
producer on 21 Jump Street describes Johnny Depp
like this: “I don’t always agree with him, but I see where
he’s coming
from. He fights hard for what he believes in, and he has a tendency
to fight for other people as well, which sometimes puts another
strand of grey in my hair.”

If that makes Depp
sound difficult, then it could be argued he’s earned the
right to
be. In the three seasons that Jump Street, the
tough,
hard-hitting series about a gang of young undercover cops, has been
on the air, Depp has achieved the kind of status—compared
to the
rest of the cast—that Joan Collins enjoyed on Dynasty,
though fortunately he isn’t afflicted with her taste in
clothes.
But then Depp doesn’t need a Liberace-style outfit change
every 10
minutes à la Don Johnson in Miami
Vice (a show
Depp himself claims to have watched only twice). The battered jeans,
scuffed boots and T-shirts he wears in Jump Street
are his
character Tom Hanson’s signature—and his moody,
troubled cop
role has turned him in TV critics’ eyes at least, into a kind
of
MTV generation replica of a ‘50s movie star.

Depp
might hate the
predictable label but he has the fan mail (10,000 letters a week),
the teen magazine covers (countless, though he doesn’t often
give
interviews) and the ratings to make the press clichés stand
up.

In
its regular
prime-time TV slot, Jump Street is the show most
watched by
young American females in the 18-34 age range. He’s as big a
teen
star as Michael J Fox was at the height of his Family Ties
days, and in the States he’s got the kind of status that
makes most
of the young Hollywood movie Brat-Pack look practically anonymous.

Surprisingly,
considering its star’s success in the pin-up stakes, Jump
Street
is a long way from being mere visual candy floss featuring pretty
boys running around in torn T-shirts. Instead, it’s more of a
thirtysomething for young people, a sort of
thirteensomething.

Based
on a real life
police programme which involved young police recruits being trained
as undercover cops and sent back to high schools, streets and clubs
to infiltrate the youth crime world, it tackles issues such as drugs,
AIDS, teen suicide and racism. In America’s new introspective
style
of TV show this means that the character he plays, Tom Hanson, has to
suffer nearly as much as the crime victims he’s protecting.
He’s
had a nervous breakdown, a girlfriend blow away at the counter of a
convenience store, and he’s even had to talk to his mother
about
her sex life. No wonder, as one American magazine breezily put it
when glibly summing up Hanson’s character:
“He’s often confused
and pensive.”

“My feeling is that
the show needs to go deeper into certain issues,” says Depp.
“Issues like racism and gang violence. In television there
are
strict boundaries, so there’s only so much you can do, but
the only
way to change something is to fight it.”

So
valuable is Depp to Jump Street that
his power on
the show is considerable. When he doesn’t want to do something he
doesn’t
have to. His whims, however, seem to be based not on quibbles like
how many close-ups he gets but on issues he feels strongly about.
“Sometimes there are things that I personally and morally
don’t
agree with. Like one episode where my character had to set a cross
alight. It was supposedly dealing with racism, but I don’t
think it
worked—I had to light this cross and I found that pretty
repulsive. In the end I did it, even though I didn’t think
the
episode dealt with the issue correctly.”

He
refused, though, to
appear in an episode where a high school student is murdered because
he’s wrongly suspected of being an informer, while the real
informer stays quiet to keep in with the students. Depp thought it
was morally dubious. But in person, Depp, who’s surprisingly
slight
and waif-like, seems about as unaffected by the power of being one of
TV’s hottest commodities as it’s possible to be.

Ensconced
in London’s
Blake’s Hotel, he insists on showing you round his hotel
suite,
giggling in awe at the overpowering chintzy furnishings. Decorated
throughout in soft, feminine pink, complete with white lacy scatter
cushions, walls covered from floor to ceiling in framed prints and a
pungent floral perfume wafting through the air, it seems to have been
decorated according to the Barbara Cartland school of interior
design. You could imagine other TV cops, Bruce Willis perhaps,
storming out butchly and demanding something more suited to their
macho image, but Depp just rummages in the fridge for a can of Coke
and settles back easily on the squishy pink couch.

On
his position as one
of America’s most popular young sex symbols—“the
number one teenage star in America: according to Jump
Street’s
co-creator Patrick Hasburgh—he’s amiably low-key.
“It’s
better than being in jail, I guess,” he laughs. “I
can’t see
myself that way but if people do then that’s okay.
I’m not mad
about it, but I’m comfortable with it.”

Practically
the whole
of the US seems to have been affected by the Depp factor. Hairspray
director and master of kitsch cinema John Waters has written a role
specially for him after seeing his TV show. Depp has just finished
filming the part, the title role in Cry-Baby,
cramming it into
Jump Street’s summer break. As the leader
of a gang of local
toughs, in 1954 Baltimore, Depp sports a quiff as well as knee-length
‘50s jackets and lurid peg-pants, all done with the casual
understatement we’ve come to expect from the man who made
Divine an
international star.

“It’s
kind
of John
Waters’s very, very warped vision of Romeo and
Juliet,”
says Depp. “I had a hilarious time and I’ve already
told John I
want to be in all his films for the rest of my life.

“The
sort of offers I
was getting were the sort of movies that get made every day, the sort
of movies where you pose and look good with a gun and go out and beat
people up. What was so seductive about Cry-Baby was
that John
is not your everyday film-maker, and the movie makes fun of the sort
of image people want to see me as. They always take a young actor and
call him a rebel, bad boy and all those idiot terms. Cry-Baby
really makes fun of that, and I was more than happy to make fun of
myself.”

Part
of Depp’s appeal comes from the fact that he’s no squeaky-clean movie star’s son, boasting by today’s
safe teen
movie standards a faintly risqué past, an aspect of his
character that Jump Street’s producers
have not been slow to
publicize. “He’s a kid who has often experienced
the same
problems we’re dealing with in this show,” says
Hasburgh.

Depp,
in London to
publicize the launch on satellite TV of Jump Street
(to be
shown on SKY channel from September), gives a slightly different
perspective. “I was very concerned from the beginning that Jump
Street would never be preachy or point the finger.
I’m not a
good-guy role model. Hanson’s pretty gung-ho about his
job.”

Depp,
whose adolescence
included taking drugs at the age of 11, dropping out of high school
to play in a band at 16, and later married at 20 and divorced at 22
(he has since been engaged twice, once to Dirty Dancing
star
Jennifer Grey) grew up in Miramar, Florida, the son of an engineer
and a waitress, and only became an actor by accident. He was bumming
around Los Angeles with his band playing the sort of music that
sounded “a bit like U2 maybe mixed with the Sex
Pistols” (which
may explain why they didn’t get an awful lot of work) when
his
friend, Nicolas Cage, suggested he should go and see his agent.

“I was working at a
day job selling ink pens over the phone and getting maybe 100 dollars
a week and I thought what have I got to lose?” says Depp.
“His
agent sent me to audition for a low-budget Wes Craven film called A
Nightmare on Elm Street, and I got the part.”

According
to Craven,
the success of whose cheaply-made horror film took Hollywood by
surprise, Depp’s appearance at the audition attracted his
attention
immediately. Dark-eyed with fine bone structure (he’s part
Cherokee
Indian and has an Indian chief’s head tattooed on one bicep),
disheveled-looking and chain-smoking, he had, says Craven “a
quiet
charisma that none of the other actors had.” Craven had been
thinking of a conventional, beach-boy type, and had brought his
daughter and her friend along for consumer reaction. When he asked
the girls who should get the part they instantly suggested Depp.

So
Depp was terrorized
by Freddy in Elm Street before suffering the best
death in the
film—being swallowed up in a bed and spewed out again as a
geyser
of blood. A few forgettable film roles followed before he got the
small part of the interpreter in Platoon, a
production which
led him acting in two short TV films directed by Platoon
star
Charlie Sheen.

Now
Depp, like all the
big name TV cops that have gone before him, is planning his
transition back to the big screen. “A lot of TV stars are
very much
into over-exposing themselves to the public eye and I’m very
cautious of that,” he says. “Anybody can go out and
make schlock
movies and make a million dollars, but I don’t intend to do
that. I
rate Spike Lee a lot as a director. I just saw his new movie Do
The Right Thing and I thought it was incredible. There were a
lot
of things in there that people really needed to see. That’s
the
kind of thing I’m interested in doing. I sometimes think
people
need a little shaking into reality.”